Here Comes the Summer
by Bladderwrack
Summary: Schuldig goes away, and comes back, and Crawford is always one step ahead. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

Schuldig walks through districts he doesn't know, moving merely to keep from having to think about what he'll do next. He methodically smokes half a packet of cigarettes, then flattens the box, folds it with obsessive precision into a triangle and throws it away.

Finally, the land comes to an end, so he stops. Gets a can of beer – _Yebichu_ brand – from a vending machine and leans against the chain-link fence separating a factory car park from the shoreline. He stares out at the sea.

Wet-tarmac clouds press down heavy; Schuldig feels it in the sweetly polluted air and the static that plasters his dirty hair against his skin. _/Something-is-going-to-happen/_. He's not sure when it was that Crawford's precognition started to rub off on him. It's nothing useful at any rate, just vague feelings that leave him twitchy and uneasy until whatever-it-was that was going to happen has happened.

He shucks his back down against the fence until he's sitting, scoring drag marks in the dirt with his tennis shoes. The sky and the sea become progressively darker until the horizon is no longer discernible. Cold now despite the oppressive humidity, Schuldig hooks a hand through the fence to remind himself he's not falling.

The pressure in his head dissipates with the rain, as the spotted dust is drummed into a slid, darker wetness. Schuldig thinks, _That was it?_

He laughs, stretching his lips back from his gums to suck in the wet air. It tastes of salt. Schuldig has no sense of smell, and can taste very little as a result: sweet, sour, salty, bitter. He hears thoughts better that he hears voices, he's colour blind – though that's not an issue here as this seascape could easily pass for monochrome. Schuldig squinches his eyes shut – rainwater drains from the grooves – licks his lips and laps up the storm through touch alone: his shoulder blades rubbing against the fence through his clothing; his right hand still entwined in the links, holding him up and going red then white from cold; the rainwater soaking through his jacket and trickling down his back to his waistline and at the nape of his neck until he's soaked, really soaked through and he's going to have to fucking _move_ some time soon if he doesn't want to die of hypothermia.


	2. Chapter 2

He feels rather than sees the smirk, a momentary ghost of exhaled breath. Feathery hair tickles the corner of his mouth.

"Can't even stick with the present tense," the other muses, teasing. "What a fucking stupid place to put an anchor." – and then Schuldig _doesn't_ kiss him, changes direction an inch away and slides under the threads of probability again, brushing his cheek against Brad's. Schuldig bites Brad's earlobe, almost too hard.

He hooks Schuldig's knees out from under him for that, catching him before he can panic or fall, and kisses Schuldig properly, mouth twisting into a rival smirk.

Received emotion spikes through him and he curls around and slumps against the wall. He retches a few times; closes his eyes and shudders as warm bile suddenly fills his throat. Too much, all at once. He keeps his eyes clenched shut as the shuddering turns to empty, near-hysterical giggles. Like throwing stones into water, you know. He remembers telling Crawford that once. And it makes ripples too, metaphorically, so the analogy holds true.

Maybe it's the thought of Crawford that sobers him. He looks at the mess. His vomit is studded with greasy, brownish lumps. Someone else was sick here last night, someone that wasn't him. It's been mostly cleared up with old magazine pages. There are dirty plates on the floor. The thick blood clotting on the headboard seems hardly incongruous.

Schuldig addresses the corpse: "It's no good." He chokes back a laugh, and it's a laugh and not a sob; he has bile on his socks and he's standing here talking to a cadaver as if this stinking room were some kind of a confessional. "I have to go back to him."

Schuldig rinses his hands and mouth with metallic tasting tap water. His hair is greasy and gets in his eyes, so he scrapes as much of it as he can into a ponytail and digs out a hat to cover the rest. Black and woolen, made of wool that's actually acrylic. There are cockroaches, huge reddish-brownish ones skittering across the walls and over the dishes in the sink. Crawling sweaty chitinous footprints up his back. The sound is the worst, scritch-scratch bat-pitched crumpling foil; it pricks at the corners of his eyes. Cockroaches disgust him more than dead bodies. He considers torching the place, just for the bugs, he just wants to get rid of the bugs. In the end, though, he leaves without doing anything.


	3. Chapter 3

The heavy iron door shudders open, and Schuldig feels like an intruder in his own home. Familiar empty bottles and cigarette packets and dead beetles, never cleared away, are gilded alien by the late afternoon sunlight. The light warms the outer door and paints quiet shapes on the duskiness through the opening. Schuldig shuts the door behind him and toes his shoes off. He's picked up the habit of doing these things now.

He goes straight to Crawford's room. It would make no sense to do otherwise, really.

Crawford doesn't look up from his computer. Schuldig wonders for a moment whether he really has managed to surprise Crawford this time. Uncertainty keeps him lingering in the doorway.

Then, "Nine o' clock, tomorrow morning. A new employer. Smart dress."

Schuldig's heart jolts to hear him speak. He opens his mouth stupidly and shuts it again. If he tries to speak, he'll lose. He's too tired even to quite understand why he feels slighted. The adrenaline still in his system from anticipation dissipates, leaving him empty and staring stupidly at the black grime on the horizontal bits of the window frame. A fight would have been better than this; his body knows it and is puzzled. Everything in the apartment is exactly as Schuldig remembers it.

* * *

Schuldig tries to explain. His telepathy meshes him deep into Crawford's hindbrain, focused and deeper and harsher than mundane physical contact. It'll hurt, tear something probably, if either of them tries to pull away before time. Schuldig's stream of consciousness is as jumbled and disjointed as anyone else's: messy thoughts that don't bear giving voice to. Crawford, too, all power and easy possessiveness – Schuldig feels the emotion as if it's his own. He can get off on it too, though. A doctor once told Schuldig it was chemicals that caused it. It was the fluids the brain released, he said, that let Schuldig read thoughts and walk into dreams and look at himself through other people's eyes. Schuldig just sat there nodding politely, letting the man's nervous pomp and procrastination flow over him and thinking all the while /_you fuck you bullshitter you don't understand this any better than I do/. _He didn't even need telepathy to see that.

"It's disgusting." He puts his mouth around the notion. "Messy -- all that fluid." Crawford has Schuldig on his lap and is rocking him back and forth on his hips, so Schuldig's voice undulates with the motion. He draws breath on the backstroke. "Sweat and shit, and spit -- cockroach juices -- it's so fucking disgusting it makes me want to throw up." He sees Crawford raise one slim eyebrow. Crawford's frisson of amusement runs through his neural pathways.

"Life, is disgusting," clarifies Schuldig, and arches forward and tries to tongue-kiss Crawford.

He is pushed off and flipped over so fast he barely notices it happen. He starts to panic when he feels himself falling, but then he's still again, flat on his back with Crawford kneeling between his legs. Crawford, as calm and nonchalant as if he didn't have his dick up Schuldig's ass right now. He might as well still be wearing the suit. It's hardly fair, thinks Schuldig. He's lying here pinioned with the sweat chilling on his body for Crawford to inspect at his leisure, and Crawford won't ever really be naked for him, not in that way. Not in the way that has Schuldig clinging and crying under him when he comes; the way Crawford looks at Schuldig that still makes him feel open and small when no-one else can do that to him.

Crawford lifts Schuldig's hips and repositions him a little, improving the angle. He can feel the heat of Crawford's body on his chest and jawline as he leans over him, though Crawford doesn't touch him there. He just takes Schuldig's hands and moves them out of the way, touching the blue-green veins on the underside of Schuldig's left wrist with his thumb. He always pays attention to details like that.

Crawford is rough with him. Crawford will definitely leave bruises to mark his presence. It's as much of a given as Schuldig's flirting and goading and constant, constant pushing toward the raw, base power beneath Crawford's physical being; confident he'll never get at it, but needing to know it exists all the same. Crawford is rough, and this has nothing to do with clumsiness and everything to with precise, physical sadistic manipulation. It's a game that Schuldig doesn't mind playing along with, even when he's angry or sulky and knows he's still doing exactly what Crawford wants him to do. Exactly what Crawford knows he will do.


End file.
